Vietnam vet remembers, but

Monday

May 27, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Clive McFarlane

Last year, I visited the Massachusetts Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Green Hill Park, hoping to find a veteran or two who would be able to share their memories of friends they may have lost in that war. I subsequently wrote a column noting that I never did encounter any veterans that day to help me remember and reflect.

Some months later, I received a letter from Jerry Olson, a veteran living in Holden who as a young man used to toss Frisbees in the area now taken up by the memorial.

A graduate of North High School, he came of age when young men spent more time contemplating their mortality than dreaming about girls; a time when the country’s call to action was often drowned out by the voices who thought the Vietnam War was unjust.

Mr. Olson should have been a member of the North High class of 1966, but as he wrote in a letter to this paper some 20 years ago, “I had what was in retrospect the very good sense to fail to graduate, and remain a senior at North for another year.”

By the time he turned 19, two of the six members of the class of 1966 who were in Vietnam had been killed. Mr. Olson, who served as a military police officer in Vietnam, currently works as a custodian at Wachusett Regional High School, where he is sometimes asked to speak to students about his experience in that war.

Here is his letter, minus some introductory elements, to me.

“ ... Had I been that soldier you were hoping to find and learn about fallen comrades and friends, I would have told you of the jolt it was to me to see Jimmy Degnes’ name carved in a stone column mere yards from the spot from which he used to bushwhack me with snowballs. He was the first guy I knew to be killed in RVN.

“Two others, Phil O’Brian and Jerry (Guy) Protano were classmates of mine, both of them Marines who died in the war. Phil sat in front of me in home room. Jerry sat behind me. I recalled that fact during a heavy mortar attack near Pleiku that at one point I did not expect to survive, and of the irony it would have been if the three of us in a row were all KIA, and if any of the members of the class of 66 would have noticed it. A silly thought, to be sure, but given the circumstances under which I first had it, it is understandable that I still ponder it 43 years and two weeks later.

“Had I been that soldier you were seeking that Friday morning, I likely would have told you of my fear that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s maintenance would elapse. That isn’t likely for now, given all the attention given to vets, albeit largely for political purposes. I’m 64, on the threshold of geezerhood (Geezerdom? I’m not sure which noun is apt), and there are still enough of us around to prevent it.

“But history is not on our side. Up the hill from the VVM is what used to be the Memorial Grove, which was established in the years following World War I to honor the dead of that war. My mother was a schoolgirl who planted one of the trees. As a kid, I kind of adopted it. I’d climb it and sit beneath it and read. When I came back from Nam it was gone, a victim of disease, fire, or neglect. I don’t know which.

“By the 1980s, the Memorial Grove was shamefully shabby, cluttered with beer cans, broken bottles, and plenty of discarded condoms, amongst the debris. I don’t blame the grounds keepers at Green Hill. Prop 2-1/2 severely reduced their available manpower.

“Now, thanks to the politically well-connected Brian Tivnan, there is an outdoor theater where there once was a Memorial Grove. From what I know, the actors who used it do fine work. Those who go there enjoy themselves. But no one (except maybe me) goes there to honor the war dead, because it is irrefutably no longer what it once was; not a great precedent for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.